WITH THESE ESSAYS, Victorian Literature and Culture begins a regular feature, “Victorians Live,” whose subject is how the Victorians still “live,” how they remain “live,” lively, alive. The focus is the intersection of the world of Victorian scholarship that the readers of VLC inhabit, with the larger world of representation. For, quite remarkably, in our globalized time, the Victorians remain “in”–from museum blockbusters to specialized exhibitions, from home decoration to popular fiction and graphic novels, from Masterpiece Theatre to Hollywood retellings of canonical novels. Rather than assuming an abyss between serious academic pursuits and the unserious non-academic world, Victorians Live seeks to chart the complex and ongoing dynamic wherein academic reinterpretations of the past, albeit in unexpected ways and with considerable time lags, shape the popular vision of the nineteenth century, and conversely, how contemporary social concerns as well as market demands on publishers and museums shape scholarship.

The essays in this issue focus on several aspects of this animated Victorian afterlife. Barbara Gates considers several exhibitions of Victorian natural history to see their relation to current issues in the history of technology and to our own sense of a vanishing nature. James Paradis sees modern or even post-modern taste in Tate Britain's show of the hitherto unexamined photographs of Samuel Butler. My essay on Exposed: The Victorian Nude, a massive exhibition initiated by Tate Britain in 2002, and The Crimson Petal and the White, the best-selling novel by Michael Faber, examines how the discourse of sexuality shaped in the academy has transformed the Victorians in the popular mind from repressed puritans into sexy beasts, albeit of rather particular sexual tastes.